1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a video recording/reproducing apparatus and a video recording/reproducing method allowing use of a plurality of recording media at the same time.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, with progress of digital signal processing technology, digital information such as motion images, still images, audio can be encoded at high efficiency and recorded on small recording media or transmitted through communication media. Such a technology is applied to development of image capturing apparatuses capable of recording high quality images on recording media.
Types of recording media mainly include a tape medium such as a magnetic tape driven to travel in one direction, a disc medium such as an optical disc driven to rotate, and a memory medium such a semiconductor memory not requiring such a mechanical driving unit. Magnetic tapes had been mainly used as the recording media. However, recently, disc media or memory media are increasingly used instead of magnetic tapes. Generally, although memory media have less memory capacity than disc media, the memory media have a characteristic of excellent vibration resistance since they do not include a mechanical driving unit.
For example, for mobile image capturing apparatuses such as video camcorders, disc media are more advantageous in terms of a recordable time and an image quality. However, it is more reliable to use memory media. More specifically, users can capture images without worrying about the remaining recordable time with a video camcorder that employs a hard disc having a capacity of tens to hundreds gigabytes. However, if the video camcorder receives a strong impact, most of recorded data may be lost. On the other hand, a video camcorder employing a memory card having a capacity of tens to hundreds megabytes is used, it becomes easier to handle the video camcorder. However, it may be impossible to capture high quality images for hours.
In addition, there is a recordable optical disc for which a method called “write once” allowing recording of data in the same recording area only once is employed. Since this type of disc medium is not rewritable, a method for temporarily recording file management information on a part of the medium as intermediate data, and then recording the file management information at a proper location of the medium when a finalization operation is performed when stopping using the medium is employed for this type of disc medium. Such intermediate data not only reduces a capacity of the media but also imposes a restriction on file management, which thus undesirably decreases the convenience.
Additionally, there are image capturing apparatuses capable of utilizing a plurality of recording media at the same time. An image capturing apparatus capable of recording video data on both a magnetic tape (or an optical disc) and a memory card is described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-142674.
However, known image capturing apparatuses capable of utilizing a plurality of recording media require users to be always aware of the recording medium on which the target video data is recorded. Thus, it is difficult to utilize such image capturing apparatuses.